The present invention relates to the archiving of data.
Computer systems can store large amounts of data during their operations. Because the data must be available for updating, reading, and writing, data required during operations are stored in a transactional database. Managers of this data may wish to archive the data into storage outside the transactional database. Although stored outside the transactional database, archives must remain accessible for users to read their contents. The type of access available to users is determined by the way in which the archive is stored.
In traditional archives, the archived data is stored in a flat file or other type of convenient storage outside the transactional database. When accessing archived data, a user typically requires one or more particular items of data in the archive. Searching through the archive directly to find a desired item of data can be difficult and time consuming. Therefore, some index to the archive is usually maintained outside the archive. Traditionally, the index to the archive is stored in the transactional database as a sorted set of primary keys referencing the archived data. For each set of values for the keys in the index, the index provides the location of the corresponding data in the archive.